I learned an important lesson today: use the big outlines instead of the Conviser Mini Review as my main study outline. The BarBri materials say you can use either, and say that most students use the CMR as their main study book. That may be true, but “main” doesn’t mean “first.”
For those of you familiar, these are two huge books. Calling the Conviser review “Mini” is some kind of cruel joke. You pick it up and imagine that it must be enough to get you through this. But that’s not the case.
The Conviser just isn’t in-depth enough and doesn’t provide enough wacky examples to adequately prepare me for the totally absurd Multistate multiple choice questions. In fact, by providing you with a false sense of certainty in an oversimplified rule, I think the Conviser alone pretty well would sabotage me on the Multistate.
On the first day of class, someone had scratched on one of the writing boards “bite me Conviser.” Indeed.
Two more days off, then back to class on Thursday. For now, back to the Multistate outline.
Comments (2)
I have to disagree. The Conviser may oversimplify some points, but the truth is you aren’t actually going to remember most of the stuff you read out of there anyway. I found it useful only to prime my brain for the next day’s lecture. After that, I only used the handouts and the Multistate software. Rarely did I find any multistate question that wasn’t covered by those materials.
Caveat: Early in my study schedule, when I was using the full outline, I retained one fact from the big outline: in Texas, a single corporation cannot legally operated both a stockyard and a meat-processing plant. Wouldn’t you know, I was able to use it in one of my essay answers. I’m pretty sure that was a fluke though.
The Convisor probably is misleading in its simplifications, but reading the big outline is like reading the dictionary. Or some other activity that’s only vaguely akin to reading. But I fully concur with the sentiment.